Hiroya Miura – Blowout

Hiroya Miura – Blowout (2011)

Premiere Performance
Carnegie Hall’s JapanNY Festival 2011
Line C3 Percussion Group
John Ostrowski, Haruka Fujii, Sam Solomon, Chris Thompson

Blowout was inspired by the English onomatopoeia used in the 1960’s Batman cartoons. I was aware that Japanese, my native language, has an unusually large inventory of onomatopoeia, during my early teenage years of learning English for the first time, I was delighted to see the old Batman TV cartoons with full of nonsensical words appearing in speech bubbles. In 2010, when I saw the wind-up monkeys playing drums at the close-out sale of a toy store in my hometown of Sendai, I thought about writing a piece which would pay an homage to the campy Japanese and American cartoons from the 60’s and 70’s.  I made several trips to the party stores and collected some noise-making toys, and organized their sounds as I labeled them using the most commonly used onomatopoeia in these cartoons.

Blowout was written for the Carnegie Hall’s JapanNY Festival 2011, and premiered by Line C3 Percussion Group: John Ostrowski, Haruka Fujii, Chris Thompson, and Sam Solomon.

—Hiroya Miura